Virtually Paul

The Australian public doesn’t click with Jesus?

February 6, 2007 on 8:52 pm | In Books, Church, Faith, Opinion, Theology |

Apologies for trying to provoke your interest with the post title but something that I saw online today got me thinking big time.  I don’t know if you picked up the 3rd or 4th tier news story in the last couple of days about some church putting up a “Jesus loves Osama” sign out the front? (Matt Glover has already mentioned it.) Digger has a bit more to say about it as well but his site is in the middle of transferring to a new domain so I can’t link the post.  What you may not know is that on a certain quite prominent Australian website (which may or may not force itself to be the default homepage in the default browser on a popular operating system)… yes, well… a website, which shall remain nameless… ran a poll with the question:

Are churches right to say ‘Jesus loves Osama’?

Out of the 185,000 odd clicks that the poll had received when I last looked, I was unsurprised but at the same time kind of intrigued, to find that about 82% of respondents voted “No.” (If you’re a uni student, that’s a HD… so “No” did pretty well for itself.)

You wouldn’t have thought that something like this would surprise me. But it did. Maybe it’s the church kid in me. See, I’ve grown up in an environment where, even if people did an absolutely pathetic job of practicing what they preach, the essence of the Christian message - the Gospel of grace and forgiveness - was always something that I’ve been hearing about. It actually hadn’t occurred to me that most people actually don’t have the same experience. After 23 years as a church participant, I’m very accustomed to the idea of forgiving the undeserving and the guilty. In fact, if Jesus doesn’t love Osama, then he isn’t who Christians think he is. That’s how deep it goes.

C.S. Lewis, in Mere Christianity says:

Christianity does not want us to reduce by one atom the hatred we feel for cruelty and treachery. We ought to hate them. Not one word of what we have said about them needs to be unsaid. But it does want us to hate them in the same way in which we hate things in ourselves: being sorry that the man should have done such things, and hoping, if it is anyway possible, that somehow, sometime, somewhere he can be cured and made human again.

I’m only just beginning to feel like I understand what it really means to “Love your neighbour as yourself”. I guess I expected more from everyone else. I guess I expected people to see that, as humans, we really stand to benefit far more from hating actions rather than hating other people.